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How Did AWS, Google Handle Cloud Services Downtime Last Year?
CloudHarmony found that the AWS EC2 and Google Cloud Platform were two of the top-performing public IaaS clouds in 2014. Here's what else the study found.
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CloudHarmony found that the Amazon Web Services EC2 was one of the top-performing public infrastructure-as-a-service clouds in 2014.
CloudHarmony found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google Cloud Platform were two of the top-performing public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds in 2014.
The cloud services performance analyst said AWS EC2 recorded 2.41 hours of downtime across 20 outages in 2014, while the Google Cloud Platform storage service experienced 14 minutes of downtime for a 99.9996 uptime percentage.
“The more established players are fine-tuning their systems and becoming quite stable,” CloudHarmony CEO Jason Read told Network World. “AWS has been providing cloud services longer than anyone in the market and Google uses its existing infrastructure for its cloud, so it too has a long track record of managing a reliable distributed system.”
Other CloudHarmony findings included:
The Google Compute Engine component of the Google Cloud Platform experienced 72 outages for 4.42 hours of downtime in 2014.
Microsoft Azure experienced 92 outages totaling 39.77 hours of downtime in 2014, and its storage platform had 141 outages totaling 10.97 hours of downtime. (Last November’s Azure outage may have affected these results.)
The AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud storage platform had 23 outages and 2.69 hours of downtime in 2014. Also, about 10 percent of AWS EC2 instances had to be rebooted in 2014 due to a Xen hypervisor issue that was discovered last September.
Donnie Berkholz, a senior analyst at industry analyst firm RedMonk, said he believes cloud services providers (CSPs) are getting better at preventing outages, but CloudHarmony’s data also indicated that some consumers are ignoring these outages altogether.
Click here for Talkin’ Cloud’s Top 100 CSP list
In fact, CloudHarmony found that Azure, CenturyLink (CTL) and Digital Ocean provided popular cloud services despite significant downtime in 2014. (CenturyLink experienced about 26 hours of downtime in 2014, while Digital Ocean had roughly 16 hours of downtime.)
“Outage frequency, within a certain range, isn’t a blocker on adoption of an otherwise compelling cloud provider,” Berkholz said. “The question [then] isn’t which provider is best – but what is the limit of what customers find acceptable?”
CloudHarmony monitors how often more than 48 CSPs experience downtime. This cloud services performance analyst maintains web servers in these vendors’ clouds and tracks when their services are unavailable.
CloudHarmony’s full data set is available here.
Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at [email protected].
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